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Immediate recall of word lists showed significant impairment after one night of sleep loss. Since S was required to write down each word immediately after its presentation, the deficit was not due to failure of sensory registration. With 24-hr. delayed testing, a picture-recognition test did not show significant deficit after one night of sleep loss. Performance on this test was impaired, however, after a night of recovery sleep. These results imply that moderate sleep loss causes deficit in formation of the memory trace rather than in storage or retrieval functions and that this effect is probably independent of the physiological lapses (brief periods of sleep) which affect vigilance and sensory registration.
Williams et al. (Thu,) studied this question.